Friending - Social Network Friending and Friendship

Social Network Friending and Friendship

There are distinct groups of "friends" that one can friend on a social networking service. The notion of a social network friend does not necessarily embody the concept of friendship, although terminology has not yet evolved to distinguish the different types of social networking friends. These three categories of social networking friends are:

friends who are actually known

These are people that may be one's friends or family in real life, with whom one has regular interaction either on-line or off-line.

organizational friends

These are companies and other organizations who maintain a "friending" relationship as a contacts list.

complete strangers

These are social networking "friends" with whom one has no relationship at all.

Human nature is to reciprocate a friending, marking someone as a friend who has marked oneself as a friend. This is a social norm for social networking services. However, this leads to mixing up who is an actual friend, and who is a contact, not least because tagging someone as a "contact" who has marked one as a "friend" is perceived as impolite. One social networking service, FriendFeed, allows one to friend someone as a "fake" friend. The person "fake" friended receives the usual notifications for friending, but that person's updates are not received. Gavin Bell, author of Building Social Web Applications, describes this mechanism as "ludicrous".